Transcontinental

This post took me forever to write because I wrote it last week, thought I had saved it, but lost it. I got really annoyed and couldn’t gather the motivation to re-write it, so this is a truncated version of the original.

We had a nice week back East visiting family and friends, but I must say, I am happy to return to this:

It did surprise me how much this place so unlike western NY or NJ now feels like our “home” after living here for just under 6 months.

Back to last week, we enjoyed some Rochester, NY delicacies:

Abbott’s frozen custard

Genesee Cream Ale

We ate at my sister’s restaurant one night where she surprised me with a  belated birthday dessert:

We also visited Letchworth Park, “the Grand Canyon of the East.”

Apparently NY is more restrictive than CA, “banning” the public from the dangerous riverbed. [Meanwhile, here in CA, back in June we hiked 2 miles to a creek/swimming holes in the middle of the mountains where it was totally legal to dive/swim/walk around.  Oh and another time we hiked along the San Gabriel river, subject to flashfloods, where people were camping along the riverbed).

   

You can see Dan was thrilled to pose for this picture, one of many taken by my parents.

I don’t know why this large chair was at one of the scenic overlooks, and I don’t know why I’m looking confused by Dan taking a picture of me.

  

Even though NY was in a “drought” it was much wetter and greener than the opposite corner of the country:

 

   

I’ve been out on that railroad bridge before back in high school when I was younger and braver.  It turns out the park also made it much more difficult to get to that bridge than it was 10+ years ago, and I didn’t feel like doing an army crawl under a boarded up chain link fence to walk out there again just for a picture for the blog.

Later in the week we met up with several high school friends at one friend’s family cottage in the Finger Lakes for a couple days.

This included floating on tubes in the lake, leisurely boat rides on the “party barge,” playing games like Settlers of Catan and Cards Against Humanity (my first time playing; best way to describe it R-rated, non-PC Apples to Apples), icing (though, tamer than previous years), and on Saturday morning running what a friend estimated to be “about a 10k” around the little lake we were staying on – but we were without watches and later, mapmyrun informed us it was more like 10 miles.

 

   

And finally, we stopped by Dunkin Donuts at the airport after finding out our departing flight was delayed only moments after we checked our bags.  It was only the beginning of an exhilarating day of travel which included missing our connecting flight and getting bumped to another flight 6 hours later, impatiently staring at the clock waiting for our plane to taxi to a gate, running through the Chicago airport, lucking out and getting two highly coveted standby seats when on a waitlist of 56 people, our luggage not arriving in LAX with us, then sitting in traffic for 2 hours to get from the airport to home when it should have taken less than an hour.

Reading about someone hiking the Pacific Crest Trail reverses the donut’s damage, I’m sure.